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[sup] The Cross Hotel Manhattan, New York City [/sup][/center][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][indent][hr][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent][/indent]
[color=A89384][i]How exciting. My first American party and it’s something like this. Yay me.[/i][/color]

For Elizabeth Ainsworth, the party at the Cross Hotel seemed like a bit of a downgrade from the posh celebrations she had become accustomed to in London, Paris, and Venice. Sure, it still had all the required bells and whistles, but it just wasn’t the same. She had been to many New Years celebrations before, but it just felt off to the British music star. But it was better to be here than anywhere else, despite the nuances of Americans still being foreign to her. She had chosen to be a student at Colombia University to explicitly [i]get away[/i] from her “image issues” and “reputation”, so it was nice to be able to partially blend in the crowd with a bunch of affluent Manhattanites. Not that her reputation wouldn’t be “of importance” to the people who were paid to be informed. She was sure that Miranda Priestly knew all of the stories about her image issues. As much as Liza liked to pretend that she did not care what other people thought of her, comments still had a way of turning into very sharp knives -- knives that tended to be drawn into her chest.

She wasn’t fond of knives.

She could feel the incommodious itch. To reach for her “stash” and find the darkest farthest corner and to just let it go, to let her instincts take over before one of the individuals around her decided to ask about her or even worse [i]listened to her music[/i]. She went to parties to [i]relax[/i] and she picked New York because nobody knew her personally here. All of her ex-boyfriends (and girlfriends) were in Europe save for the one she dated for a weekend during her vacation in Valencia. There were no strings attached in New York for the moment. Though, if New York was anything like the other cities she fell into that was simply temporary an idle fact for the present. For the moment, she moved forward as she shuffled out of the main area, thoughts keeping on about letting go and more specifically the joint in her coat pocket. She’d most certainly be a lot more at ease with the party and her reputation or any of the bullshit that ‘could’ happen that her anxiety was screaming about. She [i]had[/i] to. She had no choice.

Fortunately, nobody was really engaging her in conversation and everyone’s attention happened to be elsewhere.

[color=A89384][i]Perfect.[/i][/color]

Slipping out a nearby door leading outside, Eliza took a breath, the cold chill of the night acting like a temporary reprieve. She had been shuffling in her pocket until she noticed there were two other people outside – the exact opposite thing she wanted to run into at the moment. She hesitated on pulling out and just taking a nonchalant smoke, though she had [i]considered[/i] the thought. Her thoughts however were full of panic, doubt, anxiety, and profanity -- as would be expected. She looked at the town for a moment, nerves getting the better of her as she looked at the New York skyline before uttering a sarcastic remark.

[color=A89384]“A bit crowded in there, huh?”[/color]